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Social Icons Link to Inner Pages

We have the social icons (facebook, twitter, youtube etc) in the footer of our homepage linked to inner pages instead of our actual social accounts. So, if you click on the facebook icon you go to one of our inner pages talking about our facebook profile and why to like us on facebook. Then on this inner page you can get to our facebook profile.

We do this so we can pass on PR juice from our homepage to our inner page, and not lose it right off our front page. Is this a good idea? Or does it just confuse users? Most people think when they click on a facebook icon they will go to an actual facebook profile.

4 Responses

Quick reality check here, Brad. Your home page has over 180 links. So each of these social media links you're wondering about is passing 1/180 of the PR juice of the home page. I certainly wouldn't be fussing about this either way. Far bigger challenges to be focusing on.

That said, I certainly wouldn't be risking compromising user experience and user expectations in order to conserve 1/180 of a page's value. I'm not saying you're doing that - I think in some circumstances a dedicated social media page can be great. But as always - make the best decision for your users, not the search engines, especially in this case.

And to reinforce what Adam said - no-following links in NO WAY conserves page rank - that hasn't been the case for well over a year. No-follow has very specific purposes - to denote a link that you don't trust (e.g. from user-generated content like comments) or when the link is a result of a commercial relationship with the target site. The third use , which might apply to a few of your home page links, is to tell the crawlers not to follow links to pages that are of no value to users other than being purely transactional - like your View Cart, Checkout, Create Account, Track Package etc.

The reason to no-follow these isn't to "save Pagerank" but to help conserve crawl budget so the crawlers can spend their time indexing more important pages.

Hope that helps?

Paul

P.S. If I were looking to conserve and transfer front page influence more effectively, I'd be seriously looking at reducing the sheer number of links on the page so the links that remain can transfer more value to the most important pages/sections of the site. Not going to be easy while maintaining usability, but that's where i"d be focusing my attention.

Abandoning your website is always something to worry about, always handle outbound links to open on "_blank" windows (new) and include a rel="nofollow" attribute to your links, or simply opt for a good social widget on your own "Social Landing Page" like you are doing it right now, just make sure your social tools are GOOD enough to replace the purpose of the Social media page itself, so you don't disappoint your visitors, since they are expecting to see your FB or Twitter page instead, I dont personally see a problem by adding a click to the process, specially when they will see a nice widget with a lot of faces and posts.

If you are worried about losing the PR off the front page you could just add a "nofollow" attribute to the buttons. Also if you aren't trying to rank the sub-pages then you are kind of wasting the PR anyway, just in a way with one additional step.

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